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Vice-president JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump administration adopted an first aggressive approach to America to dominate all the constituent elements of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle the regulations and get on board with Washington.
During his first journey abroad since he entered into office, Mr. Vance used his opening speech during a meeting of the AI summit organized by France and India to describe his vision of An era to come from American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to choose between the use of technologies designed by Americans and manufactured or the side of authoritarian competitors – a reference not very well watched to China – which would use technology to their detriment.
“The Trump administration will guarantee that the most powerful AI systems are built in the United States with an American design and fabricated tokens,” he said, quickly adding that “it is not because we are the leader alone. “
But he said that for Europe to become what it clearly envisages as a subordinate partner, it must eliminate a large part of its digital regulatory structure – and a large part of its Internet police for what its governments define as a disinformation.
For Mr. Vance, who is part of a week -long tour that will lead him next to the Munich security conference, the first European meeting of leaders, foreign ministers and defense and others, speech was clearly intended for a war. He largely reduced the room in a wing in the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Managers accustomed to talking about “railings” for emerging applications of artificial intelligence and “equity” to ensure that technology is available and comfortable for poorly served populations did not hear any of these sentences from Mr. Vance.
He spoke only a few hours after President Trump put new 25% prices on foreign steel, essentially canceling trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, composed precisely and pronounced with accent, seemed an indicator of the tone that the leaders of the national security of Mr. Trump planned to take to Europe this week.
Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will speak of Ukraine with European leaders on Wednesday, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Munich when the conference opened at the end of the week. This session is likely to be dominated by competing American and European opinions on how to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine.
With a brief training in Silicon Valley and venture capital, Mr. Vance is the image of a new generation of republicans dipped in Mr. Trump’s first ideology. After Mr. Vance left the room, not staying to hear the European response, the United States and Great Britain refused to sign the summit press release.
Mr. Vance began his speech with a direct reference to the IA security top, which was held in Bletchley Park, the Grand Estate in Great Britain, where code breakers have cracked the German codes Enigma during World War II. This conference ended with a disastrous warning of “serious and even catastrophic, deliberately or involuntary damage, resulting from the most important capacities of these AI models.” Twenty-eight nations, whose United States, promised to “work together in a inclusive manner to ensure a man centered on man, trustworthy and responsible”
Mr. Vance did everything possible to separate from this summit and from the speech delivered by his predecessor, Kamala Harris. “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI security,” he said. “I hear about the opportunities of AI”, warning that America’s response to AI challenge could no longer be “aware” or “opposite to risk”.
“The future of AI will not be won by hand security,” he said.
At a time when Mr. Trump dissolves the government’s boards of directors and the units that tracked up disinformation, a large part of Russia, China and Iran, Mr. Vance argued that American technology companies were still faced with “massive regulations” in Europe.
He did not propose to delete all these rules but said: “It is a thing to prevent a predator from tackling a child on the Internet, and it is something quite different to prevent a man or an adult woman to access the opinions that the government thinks is disinformation. “
Of course, in Washington, this is exactly what many federal employees charge to Mr. Trump because he orders all their signatures.
At the same time, Mr. Vance warned of the way in which “the foreign hostile opponents armed AI software to rewrite history, surveillance of users and censorship discourse”. But he did not explain how to monitor or remedy this problem.
European officials knew roughly what would happen, even if they did not know that Mr. Vance would be so frank. On the opening day of the conference, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke of the need to simplify European regulations. He announced more than $ 100 billion in private investment in France in AI technologies and the power to generate them. It is a huge figure for France, but a fraction of what the private sector spends in the United States, and what China and its public enterprises and start-ups commit.
Mr. Vance arrived at the heart of a central dispute likely to expand during the coming year: the European Union regulates technological companies much stronger than the United States.
The Bloc’s Digital Services Act, adopted in 2022, aims to combat disinformation and to force social media companies to the police and to more aggressively moderate their illegal content platforms – or risk billions of dollars in fines . The law on digital markets, also adopted in 2022, offers European regulators that regulators liked the greatest number of online guards to change their business practices, to prevent giants of boxer technology in users and to favor more competition.
Europe has also sought to be at the forefront of the regulation of AI by pushing to increase the level of surveillance and to try to limit the use of technology. But with the United States and China that leads to the development of AI, Mr. Macron urged Europe to relieve itself and prioritize innovation in relation to regulations.
Brussels regulators have targeted American technological companies with multiple surveys and fines. Apple and Google experienced billions of fines on problems such as unpaid taxes and preferential treatment in search results. Meta was accused of breaking the European competition rules and having insufficient guarantees to counter the disinformation of the elections. Last month, regulators opened an investigation into X on the propagation of illicit content.
The United States has argued that the approach of Europe unjustly targets American technological titans. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta chief, called Trump to defend American technological companies from what he called “European censorship” and to demand that the European Union ceases to bring them.
“We are going to work with President Trump to postpone governments around the world that go against US companies,” said Zuckerberg last month, shortly after announcing that Meta would end his verification program facts.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, who spoke on Tuesday just after Mr. Vance, did not force her predecessor – who had already left the play. Echoing Mr. Macron, herself has recognized that “we must facilitate the task, and we must cut administrative formalities, and we will”.
“Too often, I hear that Europe is late for the race, that the United States and China have already taken forward,” she said. “I do not agree. The AI race is far from over.” Ms. Von Der Leyen said that Europe was aimed at investing $ 200 billion in AI in the coming years.
But it also defended the regulatory approach of the European Union and suggested that there was a “distinct European brand of AI” which focused on “complex applications”, which was cooperative, and which adopted an open-source approach, which means that the underlying software is widely shared.
“Yes, AI needs competition,” she said. “But AI also needs collaboration. And AI needs people’s confidence and must be safe. »»
Alderman of Liz And Selected Aurelien Reports contributed to the AI summit in Paris.
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